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Thomson: In the end, pipeline is a political decision

Graham Thomson

I’d like to offer an apology to everyone who was innocently munching on their breakfast Wednesday morning when they happened to scan the front page of the Herald.

I’m sorry for the mess created when you spat your cornflakes across the table as you read with incredulity the headline, “Pipeline fate up to science; Harper says Northern Gateway will be evaluated on own merits.”

It’s not often you see a reference to the prime minister and science in the same sentence. The two seem mutually exclusive, if not oxymoronic.

Harper and the federal Conservative government have not shown themselves to be science friendly. In fact, they’ve routinely ignored science when it suits their purposes and have been accused of muzzling government scientists on controversial issues such as climate change and the oilsands. The list of an anti-scientific bias is depressingly long. Journalists wanting to talk with government scientists have had to run a gauntlet of communications managers, policy advisers, political staff and senior advisers. The government is fast-tracking environmental assessments and amending the Fisheries Act, all with an eye to building more pipelines more quickly from Alberta’s oilsands.

Documents obtained by Postmedia News this week indicate the federal Environment department actively discouraged media coverage of a major international report last year linking human activity to extreme weather events.

Researchers across the country have become so alarmed by the government’s anti-science ideology that several hundred lab-coated scientists staged a mock funeral in Ottawa last month to mourn the “death of evidence.” Coincidentally, the day after the protest, the federal government announced a scientific investigation to study the possible connection between the noise generated by wind turbines and adverse health effects reported by nearby residents. The study would be rigorous, transparent and peer reviewed, said the government.

Had the protest shamed the government into action?

Hardly.

The study ordered by a pro-fossil fuel government seems to be motivated less by scientific curiosity and more by a bias against alternative sources of energy.

Good science should indeed be the basis for good public policy, but the principle must apply across the board. If the government wants to use science to undermine the expansion of wind power, it has to also act on the science linking the emissions of greenhouse gases to climate change.

And that means being honest about efforts to reduce those emissions. On Wednesday, the federal government bragged about how Canada is halfway to meeting its target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. But any progress being made by the country is thanks mainly to reductions at the provincial level, not the federal government. Canadians are buying more fuel-efficient vehicles and the provinces are encouraging people to use less energy. And the progress is something of an accounting trick, at that, with Canada’s “carbon-sink” forests being included in the calculations this year. Canada won’t be able to meet its targets unless the federal government follows through on promises to crack down on emissions from the energy industry. The jury is still out on that.

The Harper government tends to cherry-pick what science it wants to listen to.

And even then, it has selective hearing.

While Harper says his government “does not pick and choose particular projects,” he has also betrayed a bias by saying the pipeline is “in the vital interest” of Canada.

By saying that science, not politics, will determine the fate of the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, Harper is using science as a distraction from admitting his bias — and as a shield to avoid getting embroiled in the revenue-sharing fight between Alberta and British Columbia. And it’s a disingenuous argument, at that.

The final decision of Northern Gateway will be decided, not by the National Energy Board currently involved in a joint review panel studying the pipeline, but by the federal cabinet. You can’t get more political than the federal cabinet.

Making a political decision, though, is not necessarily bad. Indeed, as leader of a majority federal government, Harper absolutely has a right to make a political decision.

A good political decision must be based on good science. That’s not to say scientists should be running the show in a democracy. Our elected officials should have the final say, but it is science that should provide the basis for political decisions, not the other way around.

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